Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the representation of embodied ethics
and affects in Alice Munro's writing. The collection illustrates how Munro's short stories
powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary studies including affect
studies ethical criticism age studies disability studies animal studies and posthumanism.
These essays offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town
verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize
win they ponder instead an edgier messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical
perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro's fiction unruly embodiments and affects
interfere with normative identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and
rationality destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics ethical responsibilities and
affective economies. As these essays make clear Munro's fiction reminds us of the consequences
of everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage
again and again.
